A few weeks ago, Khadijah Farmer was eating dinner with her girlfriend after the Manhattan Pride Parade, at a restaurant in the West Village. She got up to go to the bathroom, but was followed in by a bouncer who banged on the stall she was in and told her to get out. Apparently, someone had complained that there was “a man” in the women’s bathroom. The bouncer wouldn’t listen to Farmer’s insistence that she was in the right bathroom, and proceeded to throw her and her girlfriend out of the restaurant… after making them pay the full bill for a meal they hadn’t eaten.
At this point, some of you might be wondering whether Khadijah Farmer is trans or not. Well, the same thought occurred to the restaurant and their attorney:
But that claim seems to have encouraged Caliente in the belief that there may be a legal end run around Farmer’s rights. According to Silverman, Bernfeld, in a second conversation with TLDEF on July 2, inquired as to whether Farmer is in fact biologically female, whether she has any male sex organs, and whether she intends to transition to male.
Silverman speculated that Bernfeld’s line of inquiry stemmed from the fact that Farmer is being represented by a trans legal defense group, a conclusion he said reflects a misunderstanding of what the gender expression and identity language in the city Human Rights Law means.
It seems to me that the restaurant, Caliente Cab Company, was fishing for some excuse for their employee’s behavior, and amusingly, open equally to the possibility that Farmer might be a trans woman or a trans man. Frankly, even though there is a law in New York City that’s supposed to protect trans people from this kind of thing, those possibilities might have given them something to argue. Unfortunately, they don’t have a leg to stand on, because Farmer is not transgender; she doesn’t identify that way, she was assigned female at birth, she doesn’t intend to transition. She was targeted solely based on her appearance, because her gender expression doesn’t conform to standards of “female.” This incident is a pretty good demonstration that harassment in sex-segregated spaces can happen to anyone who’s perceived to be gendered “incorrectly.” And it gets a lot worse, believe me.
In 2002, Dean Spade went into the men’s bathroom at Grand Central Station, after a protest of the World Economic Forum. The police officer who followed him threw him up against a wall and proceeded to arrest him and two friends who tried to help. They were held for almost an entire day before being released, and although all charges were dropped, his gender was frequently scrutinized and deligitimized in debates that followed. Partly as a result of his experiences (especially with a total lack of trans-aware legal representation) he went on to found the Sylvia Rivera Law Project.
More recently, a woman named Christina Sforza was beaten bloody with a lead pipe by a McDonald’s manager after being told she should use the women’s bathroom by another employee. You can listen to her tell her own story:
I’ve heard people say before that “bathroom activism” is silly or frivolous, that it’s a distraction from more important issues. But anyone who has tried to advocate for ending discrimination against trans people in employment, schools, health care, homeless shelters, public services, as well as anyone who’s conducted a “trans 101″ training will tell you that “the bathroom issue” is one of the most common hot-button topics that comes up over and over again as people try to grapple with what it means to actually allow trans people to have jobs, go to school, receive the same basic services and dignity as other human beings. “But where will they go to the bathroom?” “What about everyone else?”
Concerns about women’s safety are frequently brought up as well, even though it’s hardly evident that trans people, regardless of gender identity, are any more dangerous to women in bathrooms than non-trans women are. It’s also seriously unclear whether a stick figure in a skirt on a swinging door poses any real barrier to men who intend to commit violence against women — an idea I first heard from queer activist and writer Amber Hollibaugh, who is awesome. But don’t think the extreme right doesn’t think of this stuff too; they’re already trying to prey on people’s anxiety about bathrooms by portraying the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) that would protect people from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, as “The Transgender Bathrooms for Businesses Bill”:
Indeed, the website “e-transgender,” quoting the homosexual/transgender group Human Rights Campaign, advises corporate human resources managers as follows:
“Employers should grant restroom access according to an employee’s full-time gender presentation.”
Read: if John “lives” (identifies) as Joanna full-time, he should be able to use the female restroom. Biologically-born ladies, beware!
You heard the nutwing, biologically-born ladies! Beware! You are the far right’s most precious commodity next to fetuses, and occasionally innocent children, for rhetorical purposes. As well as for reproduction (of course).
Let’s face facts: everyone needs to use the bathroom. It’s a basic biological necessity. When people are afraid to use the bathroom, or are denied access, they suffer in various ways. If you have a chance to watch Toilet Training, a documentary about this subject that I helped with after Dean’s arrest at Grand Central Station made it crystal clear to me and many others what a problem this was, you can hear many more stories — including those of kids whose educations have been seriously affected by bathroom harassment and discrimination.
One thing that often gets bandied about in discussions of “the bathroom issue” is whether we should get rid of gender-segregation in bathrooms altogether. Often people think that’s the point of raising awareness of the kind of problems I’ve described. But seriously, I don’t think we’re going to desegregate bathrooms anytime soon, nor do I necessarily think that’s desirable; there are some good reasons to want a fairly ubiquitous space in public areas where women can be away from men. Most of us take that for granted, but the other side of the problem isn’t often considered:
How are these spaces going to be policed? Do they need to be, and if so, why?
Who is going to be the “border patrol” on the boundaries of gender, and what are we willing to condone?
Will it be bouncers and police and restaurant managers who will use force and violence against perceived violators?
What about people who fall through the cracks? What about Khadijah, Christina, Dean, and countless other people, men and women, trans and non-trans, who get “informed on” for not looking “right” and caught in a gender dragnet?
Toilet Training recommends “more bathrooms for more people” — especially single-occupancy lockable bathrooms, which have often already been put in place for the needs of disabled people. I’m inclined to agree. A bathroom that holds one person — incidentally, much like those found in almost every home, as well as a ton of restaurants in cramped cities like New York — and can be locked is not only safe and private, but can be used regardless of gender. Heck, even people who are too uncomfortable around trans people to pee benefit from single-stall lockable bathrooms, because they can be guaranteed that some hard-to-spot trans person isn’t somewhere lurking in the next stall. Which believe me, we are, especially at the movies after drinking too much radioactive-colored Slurpee.
Thanks for posting this. Bathrooms are important for sure :) . My 2 c’s:
1. I am a non-trans woman, and I go into men’s bathrooms all the time, or any time there is a line 20 women deep for the women’s stalls. I have a small bladder, I get Urinary Tract Infections when it gets too full, and I just don’t like to wait based on my gender. I’ve often spearheaded bathroom takeovers, where the women take over the gents, letting them in as their turn comes up. Guess what: no one has ever tried pulling any violent crap on me (sometimes the men say “this isn’t your bathroom” and look puzzled). So this bathroom violence is clearly part of yer-olde homophobia.
2. The US needs about 1 gazillion public bathrooms. Going to the bathroom is a human right, and no one should have to spend 3$ for a drink every time they need to pee. I totally agree that single-stall is the way to go. I think men get defensive because they like urinals – well I’ve been a janitor and I clean my apartments, and let me tell you, any man who pees in a bathroom I have to clean can damn well sit down :-)
Actually, an addendum to 2: given the lack of public bathrooms in the US, and the environmental goal of closing the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, I have always encouraged my male friends go find a friendly bush to pee on … standing up, of course :-) it’s the one advantage nature has given them, might as well use it.
My favorite bathroom ‘segment,’ if you will, are those “family” bathrooms you see in gyms or airports. They’re glorified single-person bathrooms that are large enough to accommodate a family. To make sure the wrong people don’t use it, though, they slap a stick drawing of a woman, man, and child on the front. I’m waiting for the time when someone sees me enter one of those and calls security: “that person is not a family!”
You make me curious; what are the good reasons for having ubiquitously accessible binary gender restricted spaces? From my perspective, that sounds a lot like reinforcing gender essentialism.
But seriously, I don’t think we’re going to desegregate bathrooms anytime soon, nor do I necessarily think that’s desirable; there are some good reasons to want a fairly ubiquitous space in public areas where women can be away from men.
I think that’s just pushing the problem into another space: even if people’s identification as one of the two conventional genders (rather than others’ interpretation of their gender) dictates which particular toilets they are allowed to use, there are many people whose gender identity is entirely outside the binary.
Oh, it definitely leaves problems, which should be clear from the end of my post. And like I said, I think wide availability of single-stall lockable bathrooms is a good solution, and that’s in part because it also works for people whose gender identity is outside the binary. However, the pressing concerns right now are the fact that everyone, in some circumstance or other, ends up having to deal with segregated bathroom facilities, has to make a choice, and for many people that choice is at least uncomfortable and invalidating; at most it leads to danger of violence and arrest, etc.
As for good reasons to have gender-segregated spaces… this is one of those questions that might have different answers depending on whether you’re talking about a radical ideal vision or the practical present situation, which compels us to take into consideration the safety and oppression not only of trans people but of everyone who’s oppressed by gender, i.e. more than half of the population.
In a world without oppression based on a gender system, would we still have gender-segregated bathrooms? Probably not. People still might want privacy, but that doesn’t require group segregation on any basis; they still might want to gather on the basis of shared traits or expression, but it wouldn’t be mandatory to do so in conjunction with going to the bathroom. But of course, we don’t live in such a world. We live in a world steeped in sexism, and although I don’t think a swinging door with a stick figure in a skirt on it is a formidable barrier, either to violence against women or more pervasive and subtle sexism, I think there is value in being able to go somewhere and think, well at least I’m in a women’s space without a bunch of guys; even if there are guys in here (trans, or a dad with a little girl, etc) they’re aware that it’s women’s space. Of course, as a trans woman I’m all too aware that women’s spaces struggle with issues of exactly how trans people of various genders should be included, and that’s why I ask a bunch of the single-line questions above.
[...] vasive professional standards that require conformance to it. And then there’s stuff like this: A few weeks ago, Khadijah Farmer was eating dinner with her g [...]
Um, I’m guessing that we are the the most precious commodity next to fetuses (feti?). Children, once they’re post-born (as opposed to pre-born), are either future cannon fodder or sniveling little welfare brats.
/evil grin
I think men get defensive because they like urinals
I am a man who likes urinals, but I’m not gonna get defensive about it. Anyway, if the urinal is so out in the open that I’d be uncomfortable peeing in it if there are women about, I’d be uncomfortable peeing in it even if there are only men about.
I mention my own positionality here to illustrate my point; as someone who does identify apart from the naturalized gender binary, it looks like an instance of Zeno’s paradox of protection/accomodation, one that invariably appears to purchase safety (or the idea of it) at the expense of others. It gets tiring to be asked, again and again, to help with other issues, for other groups, with the promise that the “favor” will be returned…. eventually. No, really, this time.
The real question I guess I was trying to get at — and maybe should have just posted, in addition to the preliminary ones about “if we must deal with gender-segregated bathrooms, how is that going to be bounded, does it need to be policed” — is whether this “some people’s safety at the expense of others” dilemma is true or false, whether there is some way out of that one-or-the-other mentality that you can find on all sorts of issues. In this case, single-occupancy lockable bathrooms might be one way out. There are probably others too; if there are still going to be a whole lot of gender-segregated restrooms, do they need to be policed? What would the world look like with less anxiety about the genders of people in bathrooms? With less policing? Some people think it would be chaotic or unsafe; I’m not convinced.
I guess I was thinking more of the classic “won’t someone think of the innocent children and how they’re being corrupted” claptrap, but you’re right, fetuses are way more in the spotlight than any actual independent human beings! Edit made ;)
Given the cost, and the extra space they take up, I don’t think that single-person bathrooms would work out, really. And I wouldn’t support mixed gender bathrooms either, for a number of reasons. The most selfish is that women’s bathrooms are almost always cleaner than men’s bathrooms (from what I can glean from peeking in doors, and talking to boys). So, frankly, I don’t want any dirty, messy boys in my bathroom. I like that women’s bathrooms are penis-free zones. I don’t want to be suddenly confronted by a penis as a man stands at a urinal.
There are also girl-rituals that I don’t feel like I should have to perform in front of men, like checking makeup, and looking for broccoli in my teeth. You take your armour off to a certain extent when you go into a bathroom, and I want a private, girls-only space for that. But that includes both girls-by-design and girls-by-choice. If you think of yourself as a girl, then I will think of you as a girl.
And maybe the performance aspect is another part of it. A woman’s life sometimes seems like an endless performance for the benefit of men-at least that’s the way some men think of it, that I am here to perform for them. A women-only bathroom is a place where I don’t feel any pressure to perform.
So, what I’m saying is: if you’re a girl, or you’ve decided that you will present as a girl, then you are welcome in my bathrooms. Especially, especially, especially if you feel that you would not be safe amongst the boys. A women’s bathroom is, theoretically, a place where you are safe from men, so if other men are threatened by you, and would want to hurt you, then you should not have to put yourself at risk to pee.
Maybe it comes down who is and isn’t a threat to me. I don’t want straight men someplace where I am in a vulnerable position, like on the toilet. But I suppose dividing bathrooms into ‘threatening’ and ‘non-threatening’ would be hard to police, wouldn’t it? Although I suppose we could just have a bathroom for ‘straight, gender-norm men’ and then another for the rest of us.
Before I transitioned, I was an avid traveler (by car, I loved driving cross-country) and hiker. I no longer travel or hike, and the bathroom issue is exactly why. Even a two-hour trip to the Delaware Water Gap is too much for me to contemplate.
JPlum, I like your idea (one bathroom for straight cisgender men, another for everybody else), although I note that gay cisgender men can be as sexist / misogynist as straight ones – witness the “androphile” movement.
A restaurant in the West Village was surprised to see a butch woman after the Pride Parade? West Village restaurants gender-police their bathrooms? Maybe this could happen in Manhattan, Kansas, but it just doesn’t make any sense for NYC.
People should all move to the SF bay area, where a woman I once worked with legally changed her name to Butch.
The thing is, if I, a biological and straight woman, went to use a men’s bathroom for no reason, I’m pretty sure no one would care. And if my biological and straight boyfriend went to use a women’s bathroom for no reason, I’m pretty sure that no one would care. People need to seriously get over the trans phobia thing. Or move to Portland, Oregon, where we have bathrooms labelled “IT DOESN’T MATTER”.
JPlum, you say you don’t want straight men in your bathroom area. I’m curious how you feel about being in bathrooms with women who are sexually attracted to women?
Well, prosphoros, statistically speaking, I’m in much more danger from the straight men than the lesbians. It’s not the attraction, it’s the aggression. And isn’t having a penis a leading cause of aggression? Violent crime statistics tell us that the overwhelming number of perpetrators are male, with women down at 8-12%. Conservatives may disagree, but lesbians just aren’t nearly as scary or threatening as heterosexual men.
JPlum, I understand what you’re saying and I generally appreciate your sentiments about who you consider a woman… but could you maybe adjust your language a bit so that you’re not focusing on who has a penis and who doesn’t? I mean, is “having a penis” really, literally a leading cause of aggression, like, that’s what causes it? I think you get, based on your earlier post, that not all men have penises and not all people with penises are men, right? I get what you’re trying to say, but the shorthand of “penis = man, man = penis” is really problematic, especially in the context of the things we’re discussing and why trans people are harassed, how trans people are reduced to their body parts, etc.
Unfortunately, all of the cases I mention in the original post took place in New York City, either in Midtown manhattan or yeah, in the West Village. Unfortunately the West Village has become a hotbed of gender-policing in the last few years. For instance… in the recently “beautified” park at Christopher Pier, a historic gay hangout and mecca for lots of queer and trans youth (many of them youth of color) who have few other places to go, parks department security have harassed trans people and even insisted that the public bathrooms there are “no trannies allowed,” they’ve pulled trans people out of the bathrooms, told them to leave etc. Disturbingly, the bathrooms there even have a security booth with transparent walls positioned squarely between the men’s and women’s side of this bathroom, enabling security to watch who’s going in. Deliberate? Or just a striking sign of how gender is very literally policed?
um, why does everyone think that being in a women’s only bathroom somehow makes you “safe” from men? i know a woman who was raped in a women’s bathroom (by her stalker), so i think it’s really a stupid assumption. a man with bad intentions is NOT going to be stopped by “women” sign!
I was joking about the penis-causes-aggression thing, which I guess didn’t come across. Males are more violent than females, so I was purposefully conflating correlation with causation: males are more violent than females, males have penises, therefore having a penis causes violence. I didn’t mean to offend, and thank you for your understanding, my apologies for being insensitive-this is a really new area for me, and one I’m struggling to understand-being attracted to your own gender I get, but not feeling that you belong to the gender of your body is…well, I literally cannot imagine it, since I’ve never experienced even an inkling of it. So I may say stupid things, which you should point out. Then I will apologise, and try to do better next time.
So, you’re making me think about what I mean when I say that a woman’s bathroom is a penis-free zone. I guess I’m associating the aggressive penis with ‘manly men’, so if you don’t identify that strongly as a penis-wielder, then…does your penis become irrelevant to who you are as a person? And if you don’t identify yourself, first and formeost, as a person with a penis, then I’m not going identify you that way either.
Which, I just realized, does not excuse using penis=man as a shorthand, which is still what I was doing, in my explanation-I was dividing ‘real’ men from ‘not-real’ men.
Damnit, this is complicated!
A few groups have tried to help by offering a list of various non-binary and safe restrooms. One of them has over 800 or so to date:
safe2pee.org
Advocacy for more gender inclusive bathrooms and spaces is of course the other part of the equation…
“um, why does everyone think that being in a women’s only bathroom somehow makes you “safe” from men?”
The only thing I could ever figure about that argument is that somebody presenting as male is going to get noticed going into or loitering very near a women’s-only restroom in a way that he would not if the restroom were unisex, and the fear of attracting the attention of a whole bunch of witnesses might act as a deterrent. That’s a relatively weak argument (because yes, a door’s a door, there’s no magical anti-rapist shield hidden in the frame) against unisex bathrooms, though–it doesn’t really have much at all to do with whether or not a transperson should be able to use whichever restroom matches their presentation without fear of harassment.
JPlum: As far as I know, being non-trans does not mean identifying first and foremost as a person with (insert anatomical feature here), so why would being trans mean the converse?
Gender may have something to do with anatomy, but not in the same way for all people. Let’s let go of the “penis=man” thing, please.
It seems like you want women’s bathrooms to be an “aggression-free zone.” Thing is, nothing can guarantee that. Plenty people of all genders – yeah, including women, even including lesbians – are violent or aggressive. And putting up a sign on a bathroom that says “Women Only” isn’t really going to stop some violent penis-having man from going in there if he wants to do harm to a woman in there, like Casey said. Gender-segregated bathrooms are not at all a solution for violence against women; in fact, it’s the opposite of a solution because it actually causes violence for women and other people, as demonstrated in Holly’s original post.
Yeah, and this sort of bathroom vigilance also results in someone like me, identifying as a genderqueer butch and choosing the women’s bathroom because I’m used to it and it seems like the safest bet – getting stared at when going into the bathroom, getting double-takes, seeing people almost come into the bathroom but then make to run back out and having to say, “No, you’re in the right one,” having people straight up tell me that I’m in the wrong bathroom (dude – do you think I haven’t noticed as I’ve been standing on line for the past three minutes?), being scared when children are in a bathroom because they might make a loud comment or their mother might think I’m going to hurt them, trying to time my bathroom trips for the same time as my girlfriend or other friends who get read more readily as “woman” to reduce the likelihood of getting harassed and embarassed…
Yeah, it’s really great to endure public embarrassment, anger, worry and sometimes even fear every time I can’t wait until I’m in a safe, private place to use the bathroom. And hell, that’s the easy stuff, compared to the things that Holly posted about.
Perhaps this is a side effect of the “every man is a potential rapist” line of thought.
Absolutely. My friend owns a bar, and this option is just unworkable there due to space constraints, even if he was willing to shell out for it (which he isn’t).
Not in my experience. I’ve worked in a movie theatre, a restaurant, and a bar. The women’s bathroom was almost always much dirtier. I’ll spare you some of the horror shows I encountered.
I dunno about that. Once, many years ago, I mistakenly went into the ladie’s room (I was quite drunk). The commotion that it caused almost got me arrested.
Sometimes when I forget that I’m living in a world with the history that ours has I can’t understand why people are so hung up on gender or how other people “identify.” I’ve been lucky to be with people (emphasis added) of different “gender” identities. I can say that they were all perfectly unique and it was my pleasure to be with them, even if just for a short while. But then I may just have been born without some critical portion of DNA which unlinked my mind from my genitals…
In all seriousness, bathrooms are such taboos. Why are they separated as they are? Or maybe this is an issue of fear. Fear of the “other.” Because if they don’t act and identify just like you think they should… I shudder to think about what other insidious things they could do. Like wear white after labor day, or crush kitties. I mean just think of the kitties.
Maybe one day when we and our simple brethren are gone mankind will diverge and evolve to a point where such silliness is the taboo. Then perhaps we can live up to our namesake “wise man.” Bathrooms…
Honestly, I don’t see why everyone gets their panties in a bunch over unisex bathrooms. We had them in my dorm back in college, and it was very much Not A Big Deal. The bathrooms were actually fairly clean- when guys know that girls will be using the same bathroom (and vice versa), they tend to be a bit tidier. Even showering in the same bathroom was fine. The only thing I had a problem with was guys not closing the stall doors when they were peeing. That’s just plain inconsiderate. But then, these were my neighbors- I can see how applying this idea to public bathrooms might be a bit iffy.
Is it wrong of me to get so annoyed when people are so ultra afraid of getting attacked by men in unisex bathrooms? Statistically, or at least so I’ve always heard, a woman is more likely to get raped by someone they know that by a stranger.
This sort of culture of living in fear seems to me to be somewhat related to blame-the-victim tactics that happen to women who do get attacked. I mean, how much of a stretch is it to go from saying that men are penis-weilding aggressors that women need a secret hiding place from to saying that the woman was asking for it to go parading around fearlessly with said penis-weilders?
The only time I ever had a problem with unisex bathrooms was when I had to pee at the gay bar and the lone working stall was occupied by two men having sex. Woo!
Hmmm…I would have put it on the Golda Mier continuum, where the solution isn’t locking the women away, it’s giving the men a curfew.
I suppose my reasons for not wanting men in my bathroom change depending on how I’m feeling, and what kind of news nd books I’ve been reading about the violence of men. Regardless of the reason, I have a deep, visceral reaction to unisex bathrooms. Can’t I just pee and check my lipstick without feeling the pressure to be on display for the male gaze?
But, this discussion isn’t about me, is it? I’m being a typical privileged straight girl making everything about me.
‘Cause, you know, that’s worked so well for the Israelis.
In any case, if you identify het men as aggressive animals, than that makes it easy to take the blame for their behavior off of them. And it makes it easy to portray those who have been victims of said behavior as having acted carelessly. At least, that’s how it’s always seemed to me. Kind of an other side of the same coin kind of thing.
I’d go for the unisex bathroom. I can’t believe the woman and the bouncer made an aggressive fuss out of a suspicion. And that the couple actually paid!
It might be my lax sense of propriety, but I don’t really care who’s in the loo with me– er, outside my stall, that is. As long as they’re not flashing or harrassing me, or being a nuisance, who cares? Re: male attention, I guess it doesn’t bother me as I won’t be doing anything that I don’t do in front of fellow females anyway. God, which reminds me of this woman who basically took a shower in the sink. In front of everyone. Hm. Bizarre. Better if an attendant can be provided to “manage” the place, if only to police disgusting people who don’t wash their hands.
I’m disinclined to want men (aside from the Husband) in the same public bathroom as I am, not because I’m afraid of rape, but because I’ve spent a great deal of my time in public being ogled, catcalled, wolfwhistled, barked at and objectified.
I want to be able to piddle in peace.
[...] n in this summer’s blockbusters about accidental pregnancies. Curious. Via Kaiser. Transpeople and bathroom issues at Feministe. Ooooh I just lurve this hea [...]
[...] and call her “it” because they thought she looked too masculine. It’s the trials of Khadijah Farmer all over again, and a month earlier this year. Plus, since the woman in question is a fairly [...]